John Heilemann

Who would deny that Hillary could use a little softening of her icy image?  But when Andrew Ross Sorkin had the audacity to suggest that Clinton's impending grandma-hood would work to her advantage in that regard, the collective wrath of the Morning Joe panel descended on him. John Heilemann, as is his habit, sneered.  "Republican" Nicolle Wallace actually led the Sorkin scolding, suggesting…

Amidst all of the talk at MSNBC about whether or not Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2016, an interesting thing happened on Morning Joe on Thursday, April 10. Appearing as a guest, Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine asked “What achievement, one sentence, what has Hillary Clinton done? What's her achievement in politics that qualifies her to be President…

On Friday's Hardball, Chris Matthews continued his tirade targeted at Democrats from the previous day, in the wake of the party's loss in the special election in Florida on Tuesday. The MSNBC host bemoaned how supposedly, "Republicans say, we've got to cut entitlements....And yet, they don't pay a price for it politically. I'm determined that they pay a price for their words." Matthews added…

After Martin Bashir lost his MSNBC job for making a vile anatomical suggestion, you might think that others at the "Lean Forward" network would be circumspect about engaging in comparable crudeness. But that didn't stop John Heilemann on today's Morning Joe. Whereas Bashir's remark focused on the beginning of the alimentary canal, Heilemann's went to its other extremity. Asked how he'd deal…

A consistent talking point from Democrats and their media minions is that the 2012 election was about ObamaCare and that as a result of the President's win, the American people gave the program a mandate to be fully implemented. Surprisingly breaking with this trend Sunday was New York magazine's John Heilemann who said on ABC's This Week that because Mitt Romney was the Republican challenger…

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, New York magazine's John Heilemann described Virginia GOP gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli as a "horrible candidate" as he cautioned Democrats that Cuccinelli still might have triumphed over Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe if the Virginia Republican had had more money and if the government shutdown had not occurred…

Promoting his new book about the 2012 election, Double Down, with co-author Mark Halperin on Monday's NBC Today, New York Magazine national affairs editor John Heilemann offered Obama campaign spin to excuse the President's disastrous performance in the first debate against Mitt Romney: "...[Obama's] disdain for Romney, his contempt for Romney, he couldn't figure out how to deal with that. He…

Too smart to be President. Is that really Barack Obama's problem? Mika Brzezinski thinks so. On today's Morning Joe, as Mike Barnicle and John Heilemann kicked around the notion, as others have before, that President Obama doesn't much like politics and the people in it, Brzezinski piped up with a different explanation for his aloofness: he's "too smart for the job," she suggested.  View the…

I think we have the winner in the "If a Republican or conservative had said it" media bias category this year, if not this decade. In the book "Double Down" by liberal journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (reviewed by Peter Hamby at the Washington Post on Friday), President Barack Obama, while discussing drone strikes in 2012, reportedly told aides that he's "really good at killing…

Not surprisingly, the liberal media on Friday focused on leaked details from Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book "Double Down" that involved Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, and Chris Christie. Yet buried deep in Peter Hamby's review at the Washington Post was a paragraph claiming the campaign of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman was behind the 2011…

Imagine that George W. Bush had decided to proceed with a harsh, partisan speech attacking Democrats for "hurting people," despite a scene of mass murder unfolding just 3.5 miles away.  On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough imagined just such a scenario, and came to the inescapable conclusion: his own MSNBC network and the MSM at large would be "killing" W for his insensitivity and poor…

On Tuesday night, the Obama administration announced it was delaying the implementation of a key provision of the president’s signature health care law – a so-called “employer mandate,” which requires businesses with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance. The move to delay implementation until 2015 was criticized by Republican lawmakers, who claim the measure is proof…

Bob Woodward is a legend in modern journalism, especially for fellow liberal reporters. But that all is for naught now that Woodward has committed the cardinal sin of criticizing the White House for an operative's use of what apparently is a fairly common tactic: a harsh bullying of the press in order to demand even more favorable coverage than the Obama-friendly press already lavishes on Team…

New York magazine's political writer and frequent MSNBC guest John Heilemann confidently predicted in the December 3 issue that United Nations ambassador Susan Rice would be the next Secretary of State. That issue's table of contents put it starkly: "John Heilemann on why, John McCain be damned, Susan Rice will be the next secretary of State." Or perhaps not. On Thursday afternoon, NBC…